I had an idea of where I was going when I started Part 1, but that got lost. The most magical thing I do is writing—making a reality that hadn’t existed before I created it. I think it through. I trust the process to yield.

These days, I am reading because I always read, and as I read I enter the author’s “vivid continuous dream” as described by John Gardner. The writer creates a reality authentic to the reader such that she is fully immersed in and believes the story she is reading. That dream-state should be the goal of the writer, and according to Gardner anything that shakes the reader from this dream is a mistake.

Molly Gloss was the first person I knew to acknowledge that this dream is also something the writer herself must enter. As we write, setting, character, event, aspiration are true and real to the writer before they can be real to any reader. “No tears for the writer; no tears for the reader” is a writers’ saying that acknowledges this truth. There was an award, as I recall, on the National Novel Writing Month website about that: give yourself this badge if your novel made you cry.

When my words surprise and delight me as a writer, when I struggle through tears to read something I’m working on aloud to my husband, when I laugh at a character or am startled by what’s she’s said or accomplished and lift my hands from my keyboard, I know I’ve done something right.

I have made magic.

This past week we celebrated our older son’s 45th birthday and I baked him two cakes and our younger son was there with his wife and younger child. I have former students now who are grandparents. Time passes, and I am now old enough to recall events in “historical” novels. I have joined a writing group (I will not last). I see grammatical errors in others’ writing and usually just note the mistake in my “TYPOS & grammarERRORS” file. It’s likely I am wrong about what seems like a mistake to me. Two years of public-school Latin help, but I am often wrong about words. Misguided, fussy, irritating to others. My spelling and grammar are mostly by gut, not anything I have learned properly except when teaching. [I can explain a comma-splice, why it’s not necessarily wrong and why you shouldn’t allow one in your writing. You will be judged. sigh] Commas give me pause. [Deliberate punning.] Verb tense is an inevitable struggle. [I have altered the tense of every verb in entire novels.] My stories commence at points A through D, rapidly digress to F (for fail), wander through V, W X, and Y, and only discover Z after cutting A. How many times was I told that my story began five times or that it began on page five and the previous beginnings and pages were merely warm-up? How many times have I had to revise the tense of nearly every verb in a short story? Sequence is a struggle.

All this to say that when such testing was trendy, I was found to be an Abstract/Random. I had that diagnosis decades ago, and when I looked it up recently, the theory is still around and one website describes the way I think as a “cognitive circus.” I can embrace that.

Chaos theory is not the definition of the way my mind works. Chaos theory manages chaos, offers pattern and purpose. I’m not sure my personal definition of chaos can sustain those notions, but it appeals to me.

I am a visual thinker, and I must see where I am going in creative work. I imagine it first, create it step by step. This involves struggle because step-by-step is a struggle for me. Completing any linear task requires subverting my own nature. I learned to manage linear tasks (from baking bread to enameling on copper) because it was necessary to do those particular tasks step-by-step. I am motivated. I make lists, I check off boxes. I follow directions. [I am female in a society that demands obedience from females.] I have learned to fit myself into the box. I fit in the box. On my own, I throw everything I have into the box and shake it hard. I pour it out onto the page and look for pattern. I used the word “and” over two hundred times in a four thousand-word story. I revised to cut a few. It didn’t help much.

Before weaving, I lay out my yarn on the floor. I lay out contrasting values with dark on one side, light on the other, contrasting hue. I arrange and rearrange, I adjust with more of this, less of that, I introduce an unexpected darker or lighter or more insistent color. I leave the arrangement on the floor for days. I visit the arrangement, stare at it, pull out other skeins, rearrange, put something back, take something out. This goes one for a while, the hardest and most important step, and it’s only to choose the colors for the warp and weft.

The photo of fabrics I used in my last post? That is an accomplishment. I’ve sat on those fabrics for decades trying to get them to make sense. They almost do. A friend suggested I have two quilts. It’s true, but my machine quilter has retired and I am thinking of how to machine quilt on my sewing machine without her. I used to hand quilt, which I do not enjoy, but then I discovered batik fabrics. Batik fabrics are too tightly woven to comfortably hand-quilt, though I did do it, once. “Didn’t your fingers bleed?” the local quilt-shop owner asked me. Yes, yes they did. I could work for a half hour each evening and have to stop in order not to bloody the fabric. I might search for a new machine-quilter, but I can’t afford to pay someone for the work anymore. A possibility is to build the quilt by stitching from a center diamond, adding bands from the inside out or from one side to the other. It is a completely new way for me to make a quilt. It is a lot to ask of myself. I could do it if I can imagine it clearly enough.

Writing works like that for me. I place my hues on the page, rearrange and add, subtract and expand, create stripes and bands, patterns on patterns, and I don’t even have a story yet. I don’t know what it will look like or how it should begin or end—the middle is an another mystery. I know wonderful writers who are much better at this than I am. They begin; they end. They sharpen focus, build scenes, develop character and meaning all along. They echo themes, contrast images, sharpen language. Their process makes sense. I wish I could do that.

All of this is interesting to me, not very interesting to others. While they have skimmed to the end, I am still trying to figure out what the story means. My process is a mess. I trust my process because I have no choice.

I have written a ghost story. I wrote it in confusion and revised it till it found balance.

Magical thinking.

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I am trying to develop the habit of posting each Friday morning. Have you noticed? I failed today because I set it to post on the 23rd, which is tomorrow. This is typical.

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